Candidate degree project game

This game was hastily thrown together in under a week by me and Alex Sten (another student at KTH) for our bachelor’s thesis project. Our thesis was centered around the concept of how different reward systems can affect player engagement in a video game setting. In particular we were interested in investigating how randomized rewards stood out vs player-choice type rewards and whether players would find one type of rewards more interesting or engaging than the other. We felt that, by creating our own game, or rather, two versions of an otherwise identical game, we could investigate this thesis by attempting to isolate a reward system in an otherwise identical experience as much as possible

The result from this idea was a simple game in which the player would control a small sphere through various levels while trying to avoid the various “red zones”, some of which were static, some of which moved around a bit and some of which went flying towards the player as they got close. In each level the goal was to make it to and touch the “green cube” at the end of the level which would advance you to the next level. This is where the two versions of the game came in between each level, the player was awarded with a reward. In the player-choice version, the player got to choose which of the rewards they wanted for the next level, while in the random version the player would be randomly given one of these rewards. Feel free to read more about the game, and our overall project in our full Project report (bachelors thesis)

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